Empowering students and teachers through participation in Integrated STEM Community Overview: Students and teachers are empowered when they see themselves as belonging to a community focused around an important purpose that cannot be achieved without their participation. Research in the STEM disciplines provides such a focused community. STEM education can be viewed as the extending to students of an invitation into STEM community. Empowering students by inviting them into STEM community requires both that STEM educators be empowered through full membership first, and that they interact with students in venues where effective invitations can be issued. Below are sketched two case studies, one of an environment where teachers are being richly integrated into STEM community, and another where high school students are effectively invited.
NDeRC graduate fellow Val Goss demonstrates the function of an atomic force microscope
STEM education succeeds when it effectively issues invitations into STEM community. This point, though often ignored in practice, seems self-evident. (If a student has been effectively invited and is thus known to herself and others as a contributing member of STEM community, then STEM education has done its job. Who could affirm the antecedent, and deny the consequent? "Wait...she's missing some content!" But who isn't, and who cares? STEM practitioners know how to acquire what they lack when they need it.)
University Researchers, technical staff, K-12 teachers and students at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center pose with a 1/4 scale muon detector panel they have built for a proposed International Linear Collider
Belonging to STEM community is empowering. Belonging to any purpose-driven community is empowering, it would seem. But that this is so with STEM community is the experience of a decade-long effort to invite teachers first, and students when possible, into the high energy particle physics community through the US QuarkNet program. This invitation has been issued perhaps most effectively through the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center, which has conducted full time summer research and weekly meetings throughout each academic year since 1999. Teachers have helped design and and led students in construction of components for three generations of frontier particle detectors (D0 at
High school juniors at work assembling an optical decoding unit for the CMS detector in 2001; ten years later, other high school juniors work with live data from CMS in their classrooms
Fermi's Tevatron, CMS for CERN's LHC, and for a proposed International Linear Collider.) Teachers have developed long-term professional development projects, planned and conducted national teacher professional development workshops, and designed, wrote the grant for and now manage an NSF-sponsored GK-12 project incorporating STEM graduate students into their ongoing efforts to extend more broadly the same invitation they have themselves received and accepted.
Elementary, middle and high school teachers exploring molecular biology techniques at a week-long institute
Teachers must belong to STEM community before they can effectively invite students. Inviting students into STEM community without belonging to it oneself is like inviting them to dinner at someone else's house. But when teachers have themselves accepted the invitation to participate in STEM community, they both are and experience themselves to be authorized to invite students to join as well.
Two kinds of organizations serve as platforms for extending invitations to STEM community. To set them apart from another sort of program--Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) or Students (RES) programs--we once called them Research Communities for Teachers and Students, respectively. But in fact we aren't pursuing programs for teachers, or for students, for that matter. We are fostering STEM community, and to set it apart from the currently highly fractured status quo we refer to the common aim of all our efforts as Integrated STEM Community. Still, the distinction between professional and nonprofessional interactions with STEM community holds. So two sorts of projects, each with the common aim of promoting integrated STEM community, are being developed: a regional professional STEM organization, and research communities for students. Here are strategy highlights from each effort.
What the invitation to teachers looks like: 1. It has a research-centric culture. (Research Experiences for Teachers, or more enduring (multi-year) connections, are the backbone, here. 2. It offers a broad spectrum of opportunities for engagement (from one day overviews, to 2-day or 1-week workshops, to RET experiences, all offered in many sorts of STEM disciplines, all stable over time so that teachers can make plans to get involved in ways that suit them.) 3. It builds regional professional identity (Michiana--a two-state boarder region--is our target; michianastem.org is our collaborative social network environment; Partnering for Research and Education is our annual Forum (some 200 teachers attended last year.) Teachers are compensated for their professional time, but entirely independently of their school districts. 4. It connects them to a broader range of civic and social leaders. (This is place-based education; we have partnered with a state-wide environmental group to offer PBE workshops and fund a staff of part-time resource professionals to help teachers establish and maintain ties with community leaders outside of the classroom and even outside of STEM disciplines.) 5. (Coming soon:) It marks out a regional professional development path which teachers across district lines help fashion and climb.
What the invitation to precollege students looks like: 1. It has a research-centric culture. (Summer research opportunities; research classes for advanced precollege students; shorter STEM inquiry activities throughout the K-12 curriculum explicitly tied to ongoing STEM research.) 2. It offers a broad spectrum of opportunities for engagement (this time in a broad range of enduring research collaborations; see table to the right for an example of opportunities from one research class; also included are one-week experiences at multiple grade levels (currently in genetics with zebrafish; scanning probe microscopy in pilot; astronomy under development) 3. Classroom collaborations with external STEM organizations are fostered; collaboration responsibilities are highlighted. 4. Other civic and social leaders are involved where possible (PBE projects); school administration, district and state-wide educational organizations are viewed as funding agencies; progress against standards or in testing is viewed as proper professional behavior toward collaborators(at school, district, state and federal levels.) 5. Successive generations of students are viewed as collaborators, as members of the community. Students create and post milestone maps of progress in each area, benefiting (when applicable) from those who came before them and enabling those who came after them to climb faster and higher. Here is a low-tech example, and one higher-tech.
These are big-university-backyard versions of integrated STEM community. But we can empower teachers and students in less advantageous circumstances as well: see the second case study discussed in this contribution to the e-Learning stream at this conference.
Empowering students and teachers through participation in Integrated STEM Community
Overview: Students and teachers are empowered when they see themselves as belonging to a community focused around an important purpose that cannot be achieved without their participation. Research in the STEM disciplines provides such a focused community. STEM education can be viewed as the extending to students of an invitation into STEM community. Empowering students by inviting them into STEM community requires both that STEM educators be empowered through full membership first, and that they interact with students in venues where effective invitations can be issued. Below are sketched two case studies, one of an environment where teachers are being richly integrated into STEM community, and another where high school students are effectively invited.
Two kinds of organizations serve as platforms for extending invitations to STEM community. To set them apart from another sort of program--Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) or Students (RES) programs--we once called them Research Communities for Teachers and Students, respectively. But in fact we aren't pursuing programs for teachers, or for students, for that matter. We are fostering STEM community, and to set it apart from the currently highly fractured status quo we refer to the common aim of all our efforts as Integrated STEM Community. Still, the distinction between professional and nonprofessional interactions with STEM community holds. So two sorts of projects, each with the common aim of promoting integrated STEM community, are being developed: a regional professional STEM organization, and research communities for students. Here are strategy highlights from each effort.
What the invitation to teachers looks like:
1. It has a research-centric culture. (Research Experiences for Teachers, or more enduring (multi-year) connections, are the backbone, here.
2. It offers a broad spectrum of opportunities for engagement (from one day overviews, to 2-day or 1-week workshops, to RET experiences, all offered in many sorts of STEM disciplines, all stable over time so that teachers can make plans to get involved in ways that suit them.)
3. It builds regional professional identity (Michiana--a two-state boarder region--is our target; michianastem.org is our collaborative social network environment; Partnering for Research and Education is our annual Forum (some 200 teachers attended last year.) Teachers are compensated for their professional time, but entirely independently of their school districts.
4. It connects them to a broader range of civic and social leaders. (This is place-based education; we have partnered with a state-wide environmental group to offer PBE workshops and fund a staff of part-time resource professionals to help teachers establish and maintain ties with community leaders outside of the classroom and even outside of STEM disciplines.)
5. (Coming soon:) It marks out a regional professional development path which teachers across district lines help fashion and climb.
1. It has a research-centric culture. (Summer research opportunities; research classes for advanced precollege students; shorter STEM inquiry activities throughout the K-12 curriculum explicitly tied to ongoing STEM research.)
2. It offers a broad spectrum of opportunities for engagement (this time in a broad range of enduring research collaborations; see table to the right for an example of opportunities from one research class; also included are one-week experiences at multiple grade levels (currently in genetics with zebrafish; scanning probe microscopy in pilot; astronomy under development)
3. Classroom collaborations with external STEM organizations are fostered; collaboration responsibilities are highlighted.
4. Other civic and social leaders are involved where possible (PBE projects); school administration, district and state-wide educational organizations are viewed as funding agencies; progress against standards or in testing is viewed as proper professional behavior toward collaborators (at school, district, state and federal levels.)
5. Successive generations of students are viewed as collaborators, as members of the community. Students create and post milestone maps of progress in each area, benefiting (when applicable) from those who came before them and enabling those who came after them to climb faster and higher. Here is a low-tech example, and one higher-tech.
These are big-university-backyard versions of integrated STEM community. But we can empower teachers and students in less advantageous circumstances as well: see the second case study discussed in this contribution to the e-Learning stream at this conference.